Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce Steven Aalders' new solo exhibition Mirror, which will open on Thursday, May 30 during Amsterdam Art Week (May 29 to June 2, 2024). The exhibition shows new paintings that were created last year during his stay in the countryside nearby Amsterdam. After forty years, Aalders returned to his parental home, an eighteenth-century parsonage, where he started painting at the age of sixteen. In the series of paintings, he made there, the colours and light return from the surrounding romantic landscape, which he knew from his memory and now saw again. The harmonious proportions of the house and the classicism of the adjacent seventeenth-century church responded to his minimalistic vocabulary, which he has mastered over the years. In addition, he will show a series of paintings inspired by the palette of the French classicist painter Nicolas Poussin. A brochure, designed by Irma Boom, accompanies the exhibition with images and text by the artist and photographs by Kim Zwarts.
Aalders is known for his carefully crafted, minimal geometric oil paintings. His work is about proportion and colour. Modernist serial principles, such as repetition and uniformity, are linked to age-old concepts of imagining time and place. It is an attempt to create light and space through paint. In his paintings he expresses the rhythm of life. The multi-layered oil paintings demand a concentrated eye from the beholder. Aalders' colour palette has become more saturated in recent years and generally shows more dark tones. The choice of colour arises from impressions gained from nature or from studying colour theories, such as that of Goethe, who saw colour as shadow, which arises from a mixture of light and darkness. In addition, some series are inspired by the palette of old masters, such as that of the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Matthias Grünewald and recently Nicolas Poussin.
Steven Aalders, born in 1959 in Middelburg (NL), lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied in London at Croydon College of Art and at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem. In 2002 he had his first museum solo exhibition, entitled Vertical Thoughts at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium and in 2010 followed by Cardinal Points at the Kunstmuseum The Hague, on which occasion a catalogue was published with an overview of fifteen years work. In 2017 the book The Fifth Line. Thoughts of a Painter was published by Koenig Books, in which Aalders’ thoughts on art and particularly abstract art and its relation to the world are discussed in a series of interviews conducted by Robert van Altena. In 2020 he made an installation at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 2022 his exhibition Seasons in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo was on view, on which occasion an extensive catalogue was published by the museum in collaboration with Hatje Cantz, Berlin. Aalders’ work is internationally collected by both private and public collections, such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kröller-Müller Museum, Museum Voorlinden, AkzoNobel Art Foundation, ABNAMRO Art Collection, BPD Art Collection, Thoma Art Collection, Museum Over Holland and Museum Kurhaus Kleve.